“the Tidal Wave of Nostalgia and Alienation”: A Study of Rural Students' Affective Relationship with Their Hometown in Contemporary Counties of China

In China, since ancient times, there has been a tradition in the Chinese countryside that "a tree may grow as high as a thousand, but leaves return to their roots", and rural students in the process of mobility will actively seek their hometowns in their lives and spirituality. However, the countryside itself has become the absence of the countryside emotion for the rural students who are attending the contemporary county secondary schools. The dissolution of physical participation and shared memory deepens the sense of alienation between rural students and the vernacular.

The lives of children from rural areas entering county high schools have experienced institutional and cultural changes. This study conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 rural students studying in county high schools to explore the complexity of the representation of their affective relationship with their hometown through in-depth analysis of their affective tensions and their memory narratives, to further reveal the deeper meaning and value of their hometown, and the experiential rupture brought about by the itinerant schooling experience, the absence of the body and memories, as well as the creative application of their memory narratives in hometown. The study found that the memory narratives of hometown recalled by rural students have been purified and embellished by memory to become an imagined "hometown utopia", and the attachment to the hometown is only a superficial phenomenon of nostalgia and an adaptive strategy of rural students for life in the county. The traditional hometown feeling had an intergenerational change, the experiential rupture and emotional pain caused by the accelerated development of urbanisation have led contemporary rural students to construct a "new hometown feeling" different from their grandparents and fathers, which is represent as a tidal wave of "nostalgia and alienation".